From The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Robinson
November 15, 2009
It might be true, as Godfrey Hodgson argues in explaining why this book is timely, that without Martin Luther King there would have been no Barack Obama, although by that same logic, it might be argued that had George Washington not crossed the Delaware, there would have been no Thomas Jefferson.
One senses Hodgson wanted to laud a man who was incontrovertibly a huge figure of his time: a rebel who displayed considerable personal courage and political cunning as he confronted the forces of entrenched American racism, a charismatic orator without peer. What is peculiar, then, about this slim, occasionally interesting book is how it reveals that hagiography can ultimately diminish the subject.
The details that do catch the eye of this British biographer of an American liberal hero are revealing. As a young man, King was known as “Tweed” on account of the preppy look he cultivated. He wore the finest tailored suits and polished his shoes until they shone, all to banish the stereotype — particularly for the sake of what he called the “chicks” — of the impoverished southern Negro. And boy did he love the chicks. He was only 5ft 6in, but never short of options. “He wasn’t running after the girls,” said one contemporary, “the girls were running after him.”
We should not be sanctimonious about politicians who turn out to be sexual athletes, but King did set himself up as a man of God, and the contrast between his scripturally based call to equality and the tawdriness of his private life is rather shocking. “I’m away from home 25 to 27 days a month,” Hodgson quotes King telling a friend, “f***ing’s a form of anxiety reduction.” Hours before his martyrdom on the balcony of a Memphis hotel, on April 4, 1968, King had disappeared into his room with one of his numerous mistresses for an energetic strategy session to dissipate that anxiety.
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Perhaps sexual drive is as much the accompaniment of fear as of political ambition. When he rang his wife, Coretta, after JFK’s assassination in 1963, King told her with solemn resignation: “This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a sick society.”
He was right about that, but in the end the story of his life is not depressing, despite the terrible inevitability of his death. For America has transformed itself since 1968, partly because of King’s confrontations with Bull Connor, the Alabama police commissioner, et al, and partly because of the manner of his and Jack and Robert Kennedy’s deaths. Yet King has almost nothing in common with the current American president, who, as a half-Kenyan, Harvard-educated, Hawaii-born lawyer from Chicago, is about as distant from the southern spiritual tradition as you can get.
King’s oratory had its uses in the 1960s, but by the time of his assassination the fissures in the civil-rights movement were gapingly apparent and his Baptist rhetoric was beginning to seem old hat. Jesse Jackson, a rival of King’s who had reason to keep the flame alive to support his own subsequent presidential runs, is now as remote a figure to Americans as Alec Douglas-Home or Harold Wilson seem to Britons.
Hodgson “met Martin Luther King on a number of occasions between 1956 and 1967,” states the publisher, but in truth there is scant evidence of personal insight, never mind intimacy, and he is over-reliant on secondary sources. To say, though, that King is now strictly a historical figure, and to point out how assassination inevitably flatters the most flawed of public figures, is not to diminish the achievements of his life, however told.
Martin Luther King by Godfrey Hodgson
Quercus £20 pp249 Sphere: Related Content
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